At this late date in the history of d20 gaming, it's both surprising and gratifying to see a product like Fellowship of the White Star come across the desk. Extraordinarily thorough, containing everything you need to play, the Fellowship of the White Star is a unique product.

The setting is familiar to us - the Earth just before World War I, between 1905 and 1914, but sinister forces lurk in the shadows and horror elements arise everywhere. The Fellowship of the White Star is a group dedicated to protecting humanity from the depredations of the supernatural. The player characters are assumed to be members of the Fellowship.

The book is 359 pages long, occupies a hefty 70 megs, and is arranged for easy printing, since most pages are single column and most of the art is simple enough. The exceptions are period photographs and maps that add flavor or would make excellent handouts. I particularly lingered over the full-page map of Africa as it was in the time period. There are much-needed bookmarks.

All-new character classes are presented: the Everyman, the Laborer and the Scholar. There are also new prestige classes that are fit to the setting as well. The skills of d20 are updated to 1905 uses and are well-presented. New skills include Physics, Spellcasting and Forbidden Lore. The feat list has been similarly customized. Although magic is made to be more ominous and mysterious, the spell list from the d20 SRD is expected to be used as a base.

For me, the most exciting and fun part were the History and Organizations chapters. These presented a mysterious, occulted world in a format that lent itself to practical play and preparation. Rather than go into extensive detail, many of the organizations, for example, were presented with bullet points, some names, a goal, and some "current operations" that the player characters could be involved in. It's more of an adventure seed section than a fully fleshed out setting, and that's very useful to have.

Finally, a section full of monsters for the players to deal with is presented. These are fairly compelling and fairly standard for a d20 horror game.

I've always been attracted to this era in history and feel it's highly overlooked, jammed as it is between the Victorian era and the 1930s. Many of the conflicts that would shape the 20th century had their roots in the events of 1905-1914. Because of this and because of the ambitiousness of the presentation, I'm reviewer tilting it up one star.